The Cajun People's Celtic Roots

The way I put it together
as an amateur historian,
the Cajun people can trace their roots
all the way back to the Celts
of western Europe.

They had endured the advances of Julius Caesar during the first century AD, when
Rome redefined Gaul (their name for the land we now know as France). The Celts
of the north, caught between the Romans and the germanic tribes farther north, became
concentrated westward into an isolated granite peninsula they called Armorica ("land
by the sea")— from which I would think we got our own eventual name,
America. This region came also to be known as Bretagne, Lesser Britain, which
lay across the channel from Greater Britain. The Angles, Picts and Saxons had
already invaded Britain and literally marginalized the Celtic tribes that had long been
settled there, pushing them out across the channel into Armorica as well as back into
the farther reaches of Ireland, Wales and Scotland.

We may think of the Celts of Armorica as simple subsistence farmers and fishers, who may
not have been especially ambitious but were instead content to cope in an intimate
participation with the harsh land and the unforgiving sea. We may also be
tempted to think of them as illiterate, with a lifestyle that stands in stark contrast
to the more intellectual pursuits of Rome, but theirs was an oral tradition that flourished
within a tightly-knit community; their culture was especially identifiable by
their cuisine and their music, which were not as easily recorded as the writings of classic
Rome and Greece. They clearly were not an aggressive folk, not conquerors and
invaders, but resisters who nevertheless stubbornly, even fiercely clung to and maintained
their distinctive cultural heritage in the face of a foreign occupation, even as their
language over time became French, and as they gradually submitted to the remote political
rule of a latinate French nobility.

These were the fishers and farmers who eventually recognized an opportunity in the discovery
of a New World across the sea, and traveled there to settle in Acadie, a region in New France,
just north of New England, named for the legendary paradise Arcadia. The name
"Cajun" is in fact a contraction for "Acadian". Their ethnic
identity continued to gather and evolve in Acadie throughout the Seventeenth Century, joined
by occasional Scot, Irish and Basque adventurers that reinvigorated and reemphasized their
ancient Celtic heritage. The northern waterways they settled were not unlike the
European lands from which they had emigrated, and they quickly built a self-sufficient
fishing and farming society that was remarkable for its cohesion and successful
enterprise; but remote European politics were not done with them.

A visitor wrote of them in 1790: "The Acadians are the most innocent and
virtuous people whom I have ever known or heard tell of in any history. They
live in a state of perfect equality, without distinction of rank in society...
Ignorant of the luxuries and even of the conveniences of life, they are content with a
simple mode of life, which they easily derive from the cultivation of their lands.
Very little ambition or avarice was seen among them; they helped each other's
wants with benevolent liberality; they required no interest for loans of money
or other property. They were humane and hospitable to strangers, and very liberal
to those who embraced their religion." Much of this easily describes the
people that I met in Southern Louisiana.

As Britain and France developed into dominant political forces that competed—
sometimes violently— for control of western Europe, diplomacy became the
uncomfortable venue of choice for working things out between London and Paris.
Finally, in 1713 France gave Britain control of Acadie under the Treaty of Utrecht, and
the Acadians were suddenly— without having been consulted about it—
British subjects, and no longer French.

A generation later, at the outset of the French and Indian War, Britain demanded that
the Acadians swear allegiance against France, which they refused to do. In
a brutal and infamous act of despotism the British burned down their homes, confiscated
their land, and scattered the people upon the high seas with no particular destination
provided them. This diaspora— not unlike the Jewish exile
centuries before— came to be known as their Grand Dérangement, and
worked to further define the Acadians as a people, despite the loss of their home and land.

In a confused history of shifting international ownership Louisiana was Spanish at that
time, although the French had long before explored and colonized the region, and it was
at Spain's invitation that the Acadians eventually gathered back together and
settled there in 1784 after many years of a cruel dispersion upon the high seas.
Longfellow's immensely popular romantic poem "Evangeline" was loosely
based upon the tragedy of loved ones becoming separated during this time.

Some of them— the upwardly mobilized, so-called "genteel
Acadians"— were absorbed into the French settlements along the
Mississippi. However, most of them, it seems, were suspicious of the French
and avoided them, perhaps remembering their uneasy relationship centuries before in
Armorica, more likely remembering having been sold out by the Treaty of Utrecht.
Certainly they were uncomfortable with how they were met when they attempted to return
to France after the Grand Dérangement.

At any rate, the majority of these Acadians moved south into the bayous and west of
the Atchafalaya upon the plains, and settled in small villages where they patiently
tended the values of their heritage, built a new relationship with the land, and came
to be called Cajuns. It is interesting to see the ways in which they have continued
to grow as a people without changing their fundamental values, accepting new ideas
that fit into their character but rejecting anything that would contradict their
hard-won values.